“The human need to create fiction has always existed in all cultures and social groups.”
Monica Okamoto, providing a fitting quote for the themes of both talks
The Halle Institute has established four Emory Fulbright Distinguished Chair programs in collaboration with Fulbright offices and commissions in Brazil, South Africa, Korea, and India. Distinguished Chairs are innovative and dynamic scholars who spend a semester at Emory to conduct research, teach courses or workshops, and engage with Emory’s academic community. Hosted by appropriate departments in any discipline, Distinguished Chairs offer rich engagement with faculty and students. Their contributions strengthen international cooperation between their home institution and Emory, and they support Emory as a global academic community of choice for researchers across a wide array of disciplines.
For the Fall 2023 semester, Emory University was delighted to host Dr. Monica Okamoto from the Federal University of Paraná (Brazil) and Dr. Soo Yeon Kim from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul (South Korea). Dr. Okamoto is Associate Professor of Modern Foreign Languages and was hosted by Emory’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Dr. Kim, Professor of English Literature and Culture, was hosted by the Department of Film and Media.
At Emory, Dr. Okamoto and Dr. Kim invited students, faculty, and staff to a joint event where they gave presentations on the intersection of film, literature, and culture. You can watch and read about the highlights of both talks below or watch a shortened version of the whole event here and at the bottom of the page.
Monica Okamoto: Asian Representation in Film
A literary scholar by training, Dr. Okamoto is also active as a public scholar who produces short movies and web series on critically important topics like racial identity, racial prejudice, sustainability, and environmental protection. She presented two projects linked to her identity as the granddaughter of Japanese immigrants to Brazil: Nipo Brasilieros – an award-winning web series on the Japanese immigrant community in Brazil; and Sakaki – a Japanese-Brazilian animated short addressing ecological challenges like the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
“Life without fantasy would be kind of boring”
Monica Okamoto
Dr. Okamoto’s background is in Japanese literature, not cinema. “But I think that cinema and literature have something in common: fabulation, which is basically telling a fictional story. Fabulation allows us to recreate our universe – relive our lives. Have you ever imagined life without fantasy? It would be kind of boring and kind of dry.”
Engaging with fiction – in literature, movies, video games – makes us more human and enriches our lives.
So the question Dr. Okamoto posed to herself was – “How can I incorporate fiction into my work?”
This led her to work on two film projects, the first being the Nipo-Brasileiros web series. The launch in 2018 was attended by representatives from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, the Japanese Ambassador, Brazilian Media, filmmakers, and representatives from the Japan Foundation, “an audience that I normally don’t reach with my academic work,” says Okamoto.
In 2020, two crises collided, spurring a new motivation for her work. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic brought with it a wave of prejudices against Asian people. At the same time, Brazil experienced an environmental crisis that exacerbated the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
“But even in times of disorder, we must not lose belief in the possibility of change. I wanted to show resistance to xenophobic attacks and save the Amazon at the same time.”
Monica Okamoto
Soo Yeon Kim: Cinema as Entertainment – The Curious Case of “Parasite”
“Film serves dominant ideology by providing imaginary solutions to real social problems. So I think it’s unavoidable for a popular show to resort and affirm a ruling ideology of gender, humanism, nationalism, etc.”
Soo Yeon Kim
Dr. Kim began her talk with a quick background on the history of the movie industry to set up her point that film is a commercial genre. “Film has never been free from commercialism in its entire history,” she says.
From the post-World War Two dominance of Hollywood, she outlines the diversification of world cinema over the last decades while acknowledging that art house, independent cinema, and national cinema did not decenter the rule of Hollywood in the landscape of filmmaking; rather, they supplemented it.
The global movie industry in numbers:
77 Billion USD = the annual revenue of the global film industry
100-200 Million USD = the average cost to produce a feature film
under 5 Million USD = the budget for an independent movie
Korean Film
Dr. Kim recently published on the megahit television series Squid Game and was interviewed about the new Squid Game: The Challenge Netflix show, where she highlighted her point about the global reach of Korean TV shows.
One of the standout Korean movies that received a wide global reception was the 2019 dark comedy thriller “Parasite,” directed by Bong Joon-ho.
The ways this supposedly socially conscious film renders everything aesthetic, Dr. Kim analyzes the Spatialization of Social Inequality in “Parasite.” Dr. Kim’s main argument centered on “Bong-tail” (combining the director’s name and ‘detail’) or the Aestheticization of things, in other words, how director Bong includes a wealth of details to relate visual arguments. She left her audience with this conclusion:
“Parasite’s aestheticization of space and things shows that contemporary filmmaking, even by socially conscious filmmakers, cannot break free from neoliberalism. The film lives off ‘a transmedia ecosystem impregnated by the global capital-technology system’ for its survival: it is a cultural parasite.”
Soo Yeon KIm
Watch the highlight's from the Halle Institute's Panel on "Transnational Asian Perspectives on Film" featuring Dr. Okamoto and Dr. Kim